Man Attempts Bank Robbery at Business That’s Not a Bank

We’re nothing if not helpful here at Conservative Tribune, even to our criminal readers. In that spirit, here’s a pro tip for the felonious element among our clientele: When you’re trying to pull off a bank robbery, make sure what you’re robbing is actually a bank.

That may be the simplest element of a bank robbery, but when the robber is similarly simple, it can go overlooked. That’s what happened in Greensboro, North Carolina, this week, when a would-be thief thought he was going to make away with cash from the First National Bank.

Unfortunately for him, what he’d actually decided to rob was the First National Bank’s training facility.

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According to the Greensboro News & Record, the incident happened Tuesday afternoon. The robber walked into the facility on Battleground Avenue in Greensboro and demanded cash.

According to The Associated Press, Greensboro Police spokeswoman Susan Danielsen confirmed that the man thought what he was robbing was an actual bank. Nothing was taken.

WFMY-TV reported that the suspect is still at large. Likely not for long, though, given that this isn’t exactly a criminal mastermind on par with Pablo Escobar, Bernie Madoff or Hillary Clinton. Ten bucks says this guy is eventually caught trying to steal a Whopper from a McDonald’s.

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As a conservative, I’m not usually in the habit of using the threat of force to take money I haven’t earned from people who have earned it. Therefore, I must confess to being ignorant of the intricacies of the bank robbing profession.

However, assuming I were to rob a bank, one of the first things that I think I’d do is case the robbery target — see what security looked like, what kind of alarm they have, all that jazz. I would assume the most basic element of this surveillance would be, I don’t know, confirming it was in fact a bank.

I understand most people don’t go into bank heists because they’re a few credits short of graduating Dartmouth and their student loan fell through. However, I would like to remind our readers of Lawrence J. Peter’s famous principle of employment structures, which states that all workers “rise to the level of their incompetence.”

Just consider that for a second. This guy went into a profession where the prerequisites involve walking into a bank and being willing to wave a gun in people’s faces for money, and he still managed to reach the Peter Principle point before he even got the canvas bag full of cash.